Re: thoughts on setting core.logAllRefUpdates default true for bare repos

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
Date: Nov 4, 2009, 20:42 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqr5se58e4.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <7v3a4ugjea.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:
>
>> I can't think of any, and I just tried launching two
>>
>> while true; do git pull; date > foo.txt ; git add .; git commit -m "xxx"; git push; done
>>
>> in parallel, with two different users pushing to a --bare --shared
>> repository, and it did work well. But I may very well have missed
>> something.
>>
>> (and actually, if it causes problem, it's an argument in favor of
>> defaulting to false when core.shared is true, not when core.bare).
>>
>> Unless I missed something, I think core.logAllRefUpdates should be
>> enabled for bare repos.
>
> Your experiment justifies "could be enabled safely" and saying "should be"
> based on that is a bit too strong and also premature.

Right, there were no cause/effect relationship between the first part and the "should".

Show 5 quoted lines

> As reflog is a local thing, and not exposed to outside world,
> enabling it alone would not help a lot to people who do not have
> such a direct access to the bare repository, which by definition is
> the majority because the reason why the repository is bare to begin
> with.

For sure, it's the majority. But it's not 100% cases either.

And in most cases, even if the user doesn't have access to the repo, there exists a sysadmin somewhere who has. And the day a user will send a mail "hey, I've messed up everything, I did a push -f and what happened?", this sysadmin will appreciate to have a log somewhere.

And another use-case for the reflog is to find know reliable where a piece of code is comming from. "git blame" tells you who the commiter said he was, while the reflog says reliably who the push-er was.

So, clearly, the reflog on a bare repo is not usefull for daily use like it is for non-bare repos (where, really, it's a killer feature ;-) ). But it doesn't seem useless either, and it doesn't cost much, so ...

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/